What changes have taken place in social software? Where will it go next?

Boss, I want to buy this mobile phone. Is QQ installed on it?

The above is what I asked my boss when I bought my first mobile phone. QQ was the first client application installed on my computer. During this period, many applications were installed on my desktop, such as Fetion and MiTalk. Today, only QQ is left on my computer. We have witnessed QQ's growth from a small gadget to the current Tencent Empire. One after another, people have continuously entered the social field and faced competition, but now they are all dead. Ironically, the Tencent Empire has created another more vital social product - WeChat . In fact, except for Tencent's QQ and WeChat, the remaining social products that are still alive have all avoided these two products and entered the social field (sub-segmented fields, vertical fields) from other battlefields. Moreover, the difference in scale compared with QQ and WeChat is very large. So what changes have taken place in social products in recent years and are there any new opportunities?

1. Classification of social products (personal arrangement, possible omissions)

2. Changes in social software

1. From distant strangers to local social networking and then to lbs social networking

There are several reasons for this change:

With the rapid increase in the number of Internet users, we no longer have to travel thousands of miles to find someone to chat with online like we did 10 years ago.

While we enjoy the convenience of the Internet, we are also being domesticated by it (just like the relationship between humans and rice, it is hard to say who domesticated whom, as rice was just a small piece of inconspicuous grass at the beginning). We no longer worry about whether the other person is a murderer when we make friends online. We are increasingly able to accept that people who are nearby are also our "online friends";

2. In terms of form: from QQ typing to voice to live video

There are several reasons for this change:

The upgrade of technology and hardware, more precisely the popularity of smartphones and the substantial increase in mobile data traffic (it is certain that in the near future, people will no longer worry about mobile data traffic);

Our ideas have been domesticated by the Internet to the point that a small number of people (and the trend is expanding) are no longer shy about showing their voices and appearance to strangers;

3. Matching mechanism: Try to filter matches by satisfying the "harem psychology"

Many popular social software (including but not limited to WeChat Shake and Momo in its early days) were designed from the beginning to satisfy the "harem psychology" of the majority of male compatriots with overflowing hormones. These social software created an illusion for them: if you can't find a girl to chat with in your life, it doesn't matter, just come to us, there are plenty of girls here waiting for you to pick them, but what about now? After being fooled time and time again, the majority of male compatriots finally began to understand that this is actually a routine. The girls who greet you on Momo are either wine-ticket sellers or you know their identities. Therefore, recent social products have begun to try to be "heartfelt" and have begun to try various matching mechanisms such as mutual selection before starting a chat (TanTan, etc.) and conducting psychological research and three views (Rugu, etc.).

So what changes have taken place in the mentality of social software users behind this series of changes?

1. We increasingly need immediate feedback

Two small examples:

After sending a WeChat message, we all want to get a reply immediately. In fact, most of the time, we are not entangled in what the person who receives the message will reply to me. Many times, we just want to know that the other party has received the message. Therefore, many people wonder why WeChat does not have a message delivery function (when the interests of the receiver and the sender conflict, WeChat chooses to stand on the side of the receiver);

On QQ, some people will suddenly ask you questions out of the blue without even saying the basic greetings like “hello” or “are you there” that the older generation is used to. Moreover, this behavior is becoming younger, and the younger the person, the greater the probability of this happening.

Everyone should have experienced the above two examples. At first, I thought that young people nowadays are becoming more and more impolite. Later, I saw a more factual answer in a book: we need instant feedback more and more, and the younger we are, the more obvious it is. Why? One reason is that the younger they are, the younger they are when they are exposed to the Internet and games . They are used to the model that there should be a reward for each action they take (for example, if you hit a monster with a knife, the boss will lose blood accordingly).

Simply put, we are becoming less and less willing to wait. In the past, we were waiting affectionately and expectantly for the moment when our QQ avatar would light up on the Internet (Xu Song’s gray avatar inexplicably echoed in my mind), but what about now? After a boy sends a message to a girl, the girl may not reply for a long time because she is thinking about how to reply, and the boy is anxiously wondering whether the girl has seen it!

To extend this: The reason why it is difficult to stick to fitness is because it is too difficult to see immediate feedback, and the popular keep cleverly solves this problem.

Therefore, in order to get better and more immediate feedback, social products have undergone changes in distance and form. After all, chatting about ideals with strangers far away is far less exciting than watching a live broadcast of a beautiful girl in the same community, and the feedback is more immediate.

2. Double standards in socializing

This problem has been around for a long time, but the Internet has further amplified this phenomenon, specifically:

When I send a message to someone, I hope to get feedback from them as soon as possible, but when someone sends me a message, I don’t want to give them feedback as soon as possible;

I hope the software can match me with a white, rich, beautiful woman with long legs (real), but I never thought about why we want to match with the person we are now (of course, some people have thought about it but pretend to be confused)

3: So where will social software go?

I will briefly talk about what characteristics I think social products should have, to stimulate discussion.

1. The matching mechanism still needs qualitative changes

The current matching mechanism still has too many flaws. Although these flaws (such as uploading too many beautified pictures in face recognition software, directly choosing the most politically correct answer in psychological tests, etc.) can promote product activity in the short term (well, looking for financing in the early stage of the product, I admit that this is very important), users are getting smarter and smarter. When they find out that they have been fooled, such negative reviews actually damage the product image.

2. More immediate feedback mechanism

If the user cannot match with the person he wants to match with now, then instead of telling him that he will meet the person by swiping a few more times, a better feedback mechanism should be to tell him clearly what to do to improve the success rate of matching, as well as supporting method guidelines and phased acceptance. To take an extreme example, a boy wants to match with beautiful girls, and one of the matching criteria of these girls is that the boy must have a good figure, then a more correct feedback mechanism should be to tell the boy how to work out and how to make him stick to it. Although this will cause many lazy users who crave fast food to leave the platform, what platform can retain these people?

You can imagine whether there is a social product called "truth". Unlike in real life where we have to save face, we can break the window paper of social interaction here. If you want to chat with a handsome guy, just write it down. It's better to say whether you want a Tony Leung type or a Wu Xiubo type. Before matching with each other, we can know the matching criteria of the person we want to match without disturbing each other. You see that the conditions are very different from yours, and the system asks you whether you want to give up. When you can match by lowering the conditions, you choose to insist. Then the system will help you formulate a series of plans to improve yourself and supporting phased acceptance results (if the person you want to match insists on a house in Beijing, Shanghai or Guangzhou with full payment, I still suggest you give up, and then choose a chat partner who can accept the house and pay the down payment). Of course, if the other party's standard is to have read a few books on the history of philosophy, this phased acceptance will be much easier. We always imagine that we should know a lot of friends on social products. This is actually a manifestation of being hungry. Rational online social interaction should not be all kinds of pie in the sky. It is enough to match a few companions who can chat with you through your own efforts. After all, you only have a few good friends in reality.

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The author of this article @wuzhongjieaichirou was compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!